The sky as it looks at this very moment
You step outside in the evening and see a bright point low in the west. Whether that is Venus or Jupiter is almost impossible to decide with the naked eye. The view further down answers exactly that question: you turn the sphere until you are looking in the same direction, and the label tells you what stands there.
What you see is not a diagram drawn to a pattern, it is the actual arrangement. Every body sits at its ecliptic longitude, which means exactly the sign and degree it occupies at this instant. The positions come from Swiss Ephemeris, the same basis on which the horoscopes of Luraaya are built.
The unfamiliar part at first is that Earth sits in the middle and not the Sun. That is deliberate. A horoscope describes what can be seen from Earth, and only in that view do signs, houses and angles agree with what your birth chart says.
Which planets are retrograde, and why
Switch on the motion trails and scroll forward a few months. You will notice that the path of some bodies draws a loop: they slow down, stand still, run back a stretch and turn again. That phase is what retrograde means, and the marks on the trail sit at the turning points. Which body is retrograde right now you can tell from the small sign next to its name.
Nobody actually travels backwards. Earth overtakes the outer planet on the inner track, the way a train on the neighbouring platform seems to roll backwards when your own picks up speed. For interpretation it still matters, because a retrograde planet touches the same spot three times instead of once.
On the timeline you can see when such a passage becomes exact. Over long spans it shows only the slow bodies, because a lunar passage across ten years would shrink to a fraction of a millimetre.
What the moving sky does to your birth chart
The current positions only become interesting once you lay them next to your own. Enter your date of birth and the white points show where the bodies stood when you were born. They stay put while the coloured sky keeps running around them.
Wherever the two form a particular angle, a line is drawn. That is a transit: a moving body meets a spot that is fixed in your chart. Click a line and you see when the angle becomes exact, how long it lasts and whether it is still building or already fading.
Without a birth time there is no Ascendant and there are no houses. Both travel through all twelve signs in the course of a day, so a guessed time does not produce imprecise values, it produces random ones. The signs of the planets still hold, and the moving sky holds regardless.
Rise and set at your own location
When the Moon rises tonight depends not only on the date but on where you are standing. Search for your location in the field on the left and the times follow it. Between London and Edinburgh that is rather more than a couple of minutes.
In the view from Earth you see the same relationship as a picture: the line running across the sphere is your horizon, everything above it is in the sky right now, everything below is under the ground. Scroll time forward and the horizon travels with Earth's rotation, roughly fifteen degrees an hour. The bodies visibly rise and set with it.